Jimmy Fallon's Breaking Bad Parody Is Star-Studded, But Is It Actually Funny?

Is there room in the world for another Breaking Bad parody? The Internet is already floodedwith them, as if everyone is trying to cram it in before the series wraps up at the end of the month. But if you want the most celebrity bang for your buck in a Breaking Bad viral video, you can do worse than this one that aired on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon last night. Finding out that he's only got six months left as the host of Late Night before moving on to The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon finds out he can make a killing selling jokes on the street… you can probably see where this is going.

A mishmash of in-jokes from many different seasons of Breaking Bad, the 12-minute video features the pink stuffed animal from the pool in Season 2, the "Who is W.W.?" tense moment between Walt and Hank from Season 4, the roof pizza, Tio's bell, and the "Crystal Blue Persuasion" cooking montage from Season 5, among many others. Fallon does an impressive Walter White impression, complete with a scarily accurate bald wig, and A.D. Miles (Fallon's head writer) seriously nails his Hank impression, from the striped shirt to the jocular attitude. Then again, announcer Steve Higgins seems to have no idea how to impersonate Jesse except to say "bitch" all the time, and the guy impersonating Gus does a good enough job that you really just wish they had gotten Giancarlo Esposito instead. And Fallon, who proved with a short-lived movie career that his acting is only so-so, cannot handle "I am the one who knocks" even for a second.

On the other hand… there are cameos from Aaron Paul, Bryan Cranston and Bob Odenkirk, and somewhere in the Jimmy Fallon office there are a ton of Pollos Hermanos chicken buckets, so I'm now going to stage a highly elaborate heist to steal some from 30 Rock (think magnets would help?) Still, stacking up a ton of references does not necessarily make something funny, and as much as I usually like Jimmy Fallon, nothing in this is as funny as your average scene in Saul Goodman's office. Or Gale's karaoke video. Or the entire scene in which Badger gets collared by an undercover cop. Allow Vince Gilligan's masterpiece to take it away and show how you actually make drug-dealing funny.